And, for what it’s worth, I’ll freely acknowledge that Trump’s election is having a very good effect on my leftist friends. Because they fear the new occupant of the White House, they’re now much more sympathetic to the notion that there should be limits on the power of the federal government and they’re acknowledging that maybe federalism isn’t such a bad idea after all.

Indeed, some of them are so supportive of limiting the impact of Washington that they’re considering secession! The L.A. Daily Newsreports on a growing campaign in the Golden State.

“Yes California,” a pro-secession group, filed paperwork with the state attorney general in November for a proposed 2018 ballot measure to strike language in the state constitution binding California to the United States. …If its ballot measure succeeds, Yes California would pursue a 2019 vote to declare the state’s independence. …Talk of California secession is nothing new. But it gained momentum after Donald Trump’s election. Hillary Clinton got 62 percent of California’s vote in defeating Trump… According to Yes California, a path to secession exists through the U.S.-ratified United Nations charter.

By the way, I thought cozying up to Moscow was a bad thing now. But since the Yes California crowd is even trying to establish relations with Putin-land, I guess coziness is in the eye of the beholder.

…it’s time for the media to stop dismissing the idea as a zany left coast response to the newly elected Republican federal government. …secession could be a reality in our lifetime. …Californians could expect to initiate advanced-level progress in racial justice…free of restriction an independent California could actually demonstrate the success of progressive values in action… It’s difficult to say whether California’s rich Democrats in coastal enclaves would be down with paying reparations if the independent nation were scrapping its ties to the U.S. and its colonial past.

But a column in the L.A. Times by Conor Friedersdorf says statist values would suffer if California became independent.

Blue America would lose its biggest source of electoral votes in all future elections. The Senate would have two fewer Democrats. The House of Representatives would lose 38 Democrats and just 14 Republicans. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, among the most liberal in the nation, would be changed irrevocably. And the U.S. as a whole would suddenly be a lot less ethnically diverse than it is today. For those reasons, Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, Republicans with White House ambitions, opponents of legalizing marijuana, advocates of criminalizing abortion and various white nationalist groups might all conclude –– for different reasons –– that they would benefit politically from a separation, even as liberals and progressives across America would correctly see it as a catastrophe.

Which may explain why many folks on the right are cheering for secession. Here are some excerpts from another column in the L.A. Times.

…judging by the letters we’ve received from across the country on the burgeoning secessionist movement known as “Calexit,” some readers would be happy see us go — or at least take pleasure in watching our deep-blue state suffer… I have some advice to the sane citizens of California: Members of the middle class should start planning their own exit. When California loses all those billions from the federal government, the politicians are going to need to find money elsewhere, and you know Hollywood’s millionaires aren’t going to provide it. They’ll move to their mountain homes in Wyoming or elsewhere. You think all those new billionaires in Silicon Valley will eagerly part with their money? Think again. They’ll hide their wealth in tax shelters. The refugees and illegal immigrants on the receiving end of California’s generous benefits aren’t going to provide needed tax revenues, so the politicians will target the middle class.

Simply stated, you can’t have a cradle-to-grave welfare state unless the middle class is so over-taxed that they have to rely on government for healthcare, education, retirement, and just about everything else.

A big part of the problem is that the public sector in California is wildly overcompensated. Kevin Williamson explains.

State and local government spending adds up to nearly 20 percent of California’s economic output, while thriftier states such as Texas and New Hampshire spend less than 15 percent. …California’s government, like the federal government and most other state and local governments, spends its money on salaries, benefits, pensions, and other forms of employee compensation. The numbers are contentious — for obvious political reasons — but it is estimated that something between half and 80 percent of California’s state and local spending ultimately goes to employee compensation. …The first and smaller problem is that many government workers are paid too much. …The second and larger problem with public-sector workers is that there are a whole lot of them. …When politicians talk about “investments,” we think they mean bridges and research laboratories and canals to bring water to central California. But what they are investing in is dependency. In California, that means creating a lot of full-time jobs for Democrats.

But it’s not just that there are too many bureaucrats and that they are overpaid. They also become a big burden when they retire.

California is already paying $5.38 billion to the California Public Employees’ Retirement System this year, and in fiscal year 2018 the state will need to add at least $200 million more. By fiscal year 2024 the annual tab will increase at least $2 billion from current levels. This all comes on top of increases already scheduled under the system, according to Governor Jerry Brown’s finance department. …California’s revenue is volatile because it draws a large share of taxes from wealthy residents whose incomes are tied closely to the stock market. The top 1 percent of earners — who tend to own shares — accounted for nearly half of the state’s personal income-tax collections in 2014.

And the big tax hikes that will be imposed on the middle class will add to the misery they already suffer. Here’s more evidence of how the middle class is being eviscerated.

…the gap between what Californians pay versus the rest of the country has nearly doubled to about 50%. This translates into a staggering bill. Although California uses 2.6% less electricity annually from the power grid now than in 2008, residential and business customers together pay $6.8 billion more for power than they did then. …“California has this tradition of astonishingly bad decisions,” said McCullough, the energy consultant. “They build and charge the ratepayers. There’s nothing dishonest about it. There’s nothing complicated. It’s just bad planning.”

The state is currently experiencing another perfect storm of increased crime, decreased incarceration, still ongoing illegal immigration, and record poverty. All that is energized by a strapped middle class that is still fleeing the overregulated and overtaxed state, while the arriving poor take their places in hopes of generous entitlements, jobs servicing the elite, and government employment. …Go to a U-Haul trailer franchise in the state. The rental-trailer-return rates of going into California are a fraction of those going out. Surely never in civilization’s history have so many been so willing to leave a natural paradise. …What makes the law-abiding leave California is not just the sanctimoniousness, the high taxes, or the criminality. It is always the insult added to injury. We suffer not only from the highest basket of income, sales, and gas taxes in the nation, but also from nearly the worst schools and infrastructure. We have the costliest entitlements and the most entitled.

Nestlé USA, “the maker of Häagen-Dazs, Baby Ruth, Lean Cuisine, and dozens of other mass brands,” is moving its U.S. headquarters from California to Virginia. It is among many businesses that have left California in recent years. In 2010, Northrop Grumman Corp. moved its headquarters out of California, leaving the state that gave birth to the aerospace industry without a single major military contractor based there. Last Spring, the parent company of Carl’s Jr., founded in Anaheim, California, 60 years ago, relocated its headquarters to Nashville, Tennessee, where there is no state income tax. …reported the San Jose Mercury News in June 2016. “During the 12 months ending June 30, the number of people leaving California for another state exceeded by 61,100 the number who moved here from elsewhere in the U.S., according to state Finance Department statistics. ‘They are tired of the expense of living here. They are tired of the state of California and the endless taxes here,’ said Scott McElfresh, a certified moving consultant. ‘People are getting soaked every time they turn around.’” …For businesses, the worst is yet to come. California is increasing its minimum wage over the next several years to $15 per hour. …the increase will ultimately cost California 700,000 jobs. An economist at Moody’s calculated that 31,000 to 160,000 California manufacturing jobs will be lost. California taxes may rise further, to deal with a rising state budget deficit over the next decade. The deficit is rising in part due to California’s unusually high state welfare spending which grew about twice as fast in California in 2016 as in the U.S. as a whole. California also spends its transportation dollars very poorly, and it is wasting billions on a high-speed rail boondoggle that few people will ride.

Indeed, Bader’s column illustrates the real reason why CalExit almost certainly will lead to disaster. People and businesses will vote with their feet.

So unless the politicians in Sacramento decide to erect a barbed wire fence around the border (maybe we shouldn’t joke), the state’s feudalistic economic system will be unsustainable.

Though there is an alternative scenario. Perhaps independence will have a sobering effect on the state’s kleptocrats and they’ll recognize the importance of quasi-sensible policy once California is an independent nation.

“Report: California Second Worst State for Economic Freedom”
by CHRISS W. STREET

“A new international report has found that due to the burden of regulatory overreach and the highest taxes in the nation, California ranks 49th out of all 50 U.S. states in economic freedom. Only New York is worse.”

Yeah, it’s so much better when your boy Hussein kills random civilians with his cheep drones, so the Hoplite pilots can stay safe in their command bunkers when they do it. And, you think a Demonic Rat is a shoo in for President in 2020? Après Trump, le deluge, mon frère. And, you think that the Blue Counties of Gruberfornia will be able to drag the Red Counties along with them out of the Union? Really? You and what Rebel Army? It’ll be West Virginia, dummy.

I hope it picks up greater steam, even if it doesn’t happen. Normalizing the notion of secession would be a good thing. Washington needs another check on power.

However, I figure that Calexit has less than 4 years to make anything out of it before a Democrat occupies the White House and calms all their fears, thereby making secession a silly idea that only a racist would entertain.

Poor Victor Davis Hanson. It must be agony for him too see so much wealth wasted in California on the welfare state and lavish public sector pensions. After all, every dollar wasted there is a dollar not spent building bombs or training the Hoplites.

In 1990, the Slovaks voted to secede from the Czechs because the Slovaks wanted a bigger welfare state than the Czechs did. But once independent, they took a realistic new look at the budget (the Czechs had been the net tax payers of the union) and realized they’d better cut back, lest they fall into the hole of endless deficit spending.

As a result the Slovaks now have a much smaller welfare state and are much more prosperous than they were before 1990.

It would be great if this happens to California. Or Scotland, or lots of other places.

…and a new structural American growth rate of 2% in a world that is structurally growing almost twice as fast is indeed decline.

Rome, …British Empire, …Soviet Union, …now European Union, …next United States…history is full of data points where decline inevitably brings discord, and disintegration. And, again, that’s a good thing. It is the natural mechanism that kicks in to dismantle failure.

So remaining on a 2% growth rate (or even lowering it down to 1% trendlines by completing America’s transition to a European style welfare state) is a sure recipe for decline — and the corrective disintegration that typically follows. But the ride down to the point where disintegration frees some of the more productive forces is anything but pleasant.

So yes, if America stays on a 2% growth trendline then disintegration, not only California secession, is certainly in a the cards somewhere down the lines.

And disintegration will come sooner than most people anticipate. A -2% growth deficit compared to world average compounds fast. A -3% growth deficit (as in the European Union) compounds even faster, hence Europe is ahead in its disintegration trajectory.

The next 20-50 years will bring many things previously unimaginable to us; in the technological as well as political arena. Most will be wonderful.

As I said many times the pace of everything human is now moving ever faster and accelerating. Sustained world growth of three to hour percent annually is a new unprecedented reality, that humanity has never seen before, and which is not only here to stay, but also accelerating.

In the next fifty years we are likely to see more change than we saw in the past one hundred — and accelerating!

My suggestion remains… stay mobile! You may have to cross border walls … the other way!

Also, secession would open the floodgates to the idea everywhere, make it more real.

I’m convinced that the Calexit petitioners are very serious, and they have a third of Californians (according to the dubious pollsters) that are sympathetic to the idea. They actually believe they contribute more to the rest of us than they get. The truth doesn’t matter either way to them.

So they’ve suddenly discovered that states’ rights is not just a Dixie thing.

A lot of nations seceded from the USSR, Bill Clinton threw missiles at Serbia to get Kosovo to secede, Bosnia and Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia, Slovakia and the Czechs seceded from each other, Brexit should secede from the EU, the colonies seceded from the European powers, and these several states seceded from the British Empire.

I told my step-son, maybe now he can see how outrageous it is to extort money from you to support causes you despise.

IT takes a special kind of crazy logic to keep on going with this theme about “white nationalists”. They have one guy who got WAAAYY more publicity than his following merited in the last few days, and then went to another, bragging about how many they were.

How’s that for cognitive dissonance, believe two contradictory things at the same time? Ignoring crowd sizes in the campaign, then suddenly discovering it at the most-watched-ever (present + broadcast) Inauguration, then blowing up the following of one guy as if he had more than ten people even listening to him, and another nobody ever heard of ever. I forget the second guy’s name.

The biggest danger today is not “white nationalists”, it is from the lying liars in the Fake News Networks who keep trying to make the paper tiger look bigger than it is.

When those Fake News Networks (social and traditional) complain about being called Fake News, remember that it is Fake Feminist Hillary Clinton and “You can keep your doctor” Obama that first started that name-calling. When they use it, it’s a code word for “whistleblowers that expose us and our crimes”. Washington Post made themselves the champion of it with some S&M pervert’s fantasy. Oops. They propogated the term, but after that faux pas, they pleaded “Can we stop using that term now?”

The Mockingbird Media did this with the Westboro Baptist Church, too. In the real world there are XX chromosome pairs, and XY chromosome pairs, but that band of sad sacks were never able to gather more than three dozen members even with all those millions of dollars of free publicity that Propaganda Media gave them free of charge.

Smearing web sites that expose the two-faced double dealing in Washington are naturally going to get flak from the powerful people that have had their way both in D. C. and in their Media branch. Honest and smart intellects will perceive it once their eyes are opened.

No, they want to recapture the Federal leviathan and resume their impositions.

The quote from VDH about the California exodus shows EXACTLY why the leftists won’t abandon Federal imperialism: they KNOW that people flee big government, so they have to operate at the Federal level so there’s NO easy escape.

“Competitive sovereignty” arising from true federalism undermines Federal imperialism, which is why the left will NEVER truly support states’ rights.

(Unfortunately for liberty-loving citizens, Californians are like locusts, and ruin the states they move to by recreating the tax and regulatory hell they left in the first place.)

Where do they plan to get their water? Right now, it is mostly through rivers that come from other states. And what about their power sources, since they don’t allow anything that is not “green” in nature? I see a whole lot of offshore drilling puncturing their green bubble. What will their economy be built upon when they have driven so much away? Who will pay to fix when their dams burst (perhaps they’ll leave before we have to fix this latest one)? Or when the fires come, or the mud slides, or the earthquakes?

The problem I have with this is they keep coming to Texas, and they bring their voting habits with them. You’d think they might consider that it didn’t work last time, and make a change, but no. Austin is a liberal enclave filled with ex-Californians. The value to them is they can sell a hovel in California and buy a nice place in Austin. The only value in that left to us is we can sell a hovel in Austin, and buy a really nice place somewhere else in Texas. Which I just did. Oh- and they liked Boulder, Colorado before that. Drove the prices there through the roof. Much to my gain when I left there previously.

Can we vote to evict them? California, that is. In that way, they’d have to go through extreme vetting to get to Texas.

What currency are they planning on using in their new country? If they are going to have a new currency of their own what is to stop them from just printing more money when they want it. That won’t teach the kleptocrats sensible policy.

I’m sorry about having to tell you this, but, you’re pretty naïve and gullible if you think that most of your leftist friends are at all sincere and honest about being against centralized totalitarian government power now that Trump is in office. If you think about it seriously you’d realize that what they really hate about Trump is that he will do things, even a few things, that decentralize government, and reduce its totalitarian powers. This is what the leftists cannot stand to see happen, but they’re too devious to put it that way, so they pretend to be afraid of a totalitarian Trump. And they know what a sucker you are for libertarianish rhetoric. They know that you are so hungry and thirsty for libertarian allies that you will project libertarian sympathies where they do not exist.